Even though Ellsworth Kelly is recognised as one of the great fathers of American abstraction, for many years he has been pigeonholed in the narrow confines of a certain type of abstract art referred to as "hard edge abstraction". In some ways his work has been interpreted as being in opposition to the search for gestural expression that was taking place in the early fifties by the artists of the New York School and Abstract Expressionism in general, because it was strictly defined as a "non-gestural style".

Anyone would notice that, in his manner of speaking, Kelly often uses the word freedom: freedom from composition, freedom of colour in space, freedom of form from the background ... as if he had been long oppressed by too many things. Kelly was a soldier. He took part in one of the bloodiest battles of modern times, and perhaps this might have made him particularly sensitive to any sort of compulsion. This might be the reason it wasn't easy to define his work which always seemed to open up new directions just as you start to get inside it. Moreover, he didn't leave a theoretical body of work like Barnett Newman did that offered a glimpse, even in the titles alone, into his inner world. Kelly was always much more impersonal, perhaps more reserved.

Kelly's work was primarily understood, therefore, as a reaction to the poetics of gesture that, while staying within the boundaries of abstraction, contradicted its spontaneous character, its ambiguity and complexity. Instead, Kelly's painting opposed those works counteracting with ones inspired by a clarity of form, by simplification. This earned him the definition of being an artist prone to a certain classicism. It also seemed significant that this progressive simplification was born out of a series of reflections preceding the act of painting.

So it was clear that his painting was a point of arrival or perhaps a process in the making, but it certainly wasn't an instinctive gesture. A dilation of time - the act of painting - as witnessed by the preparatory work through drawing and photography: almost a ritual meant to free him from the dangers of superimposition or redundancy produced by his own subjectivity. In this sense his work on curves is striking because there are a number of preparatory works on the subject, both in the form of photographs as well as drawings. It is clear that he isolates a subject in order to heighten his focus by working on it. As a matter of fact he says, "Fragmentation allows me to free form from its context and present it as an abstraction". It probably wouldn't be completely wrong to say that the fragmentation for Kelly is like blurring for Richter: a mechanism to distance themselves from reality.

Kelly's originality was recognised mainly in the freedom of form - soft, flowing, organic - much freer from the geometric rigour that had characterised the European masters of the avant-garde such as Mondrian who seemed, perhaps, more inclined to geometrise rather than think in the abstract.

So it was obvious that all these attempts to define Kelly's work through contrasts and subtle differences suggested that perhaps none of the definitions seemed adequate in capturing his complexity. It also became apparent that Kelly was isolated as an artist because he chose to follow his own personal line of thought and refused to be recognised as part of a group. In fact his work seems to be influenced by experiments of Cage, by Surrealism, by Picasso more than by the masters of the New York school to which he remained an outsider.



In this regard it is worth introducing a few short biographical notes. In 1943, as a young student at the Pratt Institute in his early twenties, Ellsworth Kelly, joined the 603rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion. Soon after, he arrived in Europe as part of the troops sent to fight the Nazis. In fact, he took part in the Battle of Normandy as a member of the Ghost Army, a special operations team made up primarily of artists who were charged with the task of implementing any sort of tactical deception that might fool the enemy and disrupt their battle plans. Armed not only with fake weapons, such as inflatable tanks or cardboard silhouettes, but also with recordings of the battle sounds and loud explosions that were broadcast with powerful speakers, the soldiers of the Ghost Army had the job of deceiving the enemy about the advancing Army's real firepower. So Ellsworth Kelly, as a soldier, entered Paris for the first time in in the summer of 1944: a free Paris liberated from Nazi occupation.
Once back in America, he applied for a scholarship through the G.I. Bill available to veterans of the war.
He then returned to Paris, this time as a student.

It is at this time that he began his work as an artist. Not so much because he starting painting, but because it was here that he began forming the foundation of his reflections on painting, and art in general, which served to define his vocabulary as an artist. He puts it clearly in our interview: "During the years I spent in France, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I developed the kind of perception and vocabulary of forms that I still work with today. I don't think it's my method that has changed, but my work changes as I find new forms that inspire me ".

1949 marks a turning point in Kelly's career. His first work, recognised as such, dates back precisely to that year. It wasn't exactly a painting, in fact in the interview, he spoke in terms of "object" because sculpture and painting mingle somewhat.
It depicts a window of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris because it is there, during a visit to the museum in the most important artistic capital of the day, that he realises his gaze is drawn elsewhere. He realises that the life that surrounds him - the shapes, colours, space, architecture - are more interesting than the art being conserved inside this building that is dedicated to its celebration. He remembers concisely: "at the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris I noticed that the large windows between the paintings interested me more than the works of art on display."

Just as the container is more interesting than its contents, the object of the work, the window, is the simple symbol, accessible, of gazing toward new horizons in order to venture further beyond. Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris is a work-manifesto, marking Kelly's artistic baptism. So much so that in reviewing this article's layout, when he noticed that this work wasn't given its due weight (too small and in a marginal position), he let it be known that he was a little displeased: he would have preferred that it be given greater prominence.

When I found myself having to confront the theme of camouflage for Domus no. 931, in trying to comprehend the meaning of this word, probably coined in the eighteenth century to describe a game - (etymologically it means "to blow smoke on someone's nose in order to confuse, deceive") - it became clear that camouflage has to do with the imperfection of vision, with the theme of confusion, disorientation, with the dynamics of misunderstanding and deceit. Ultimately it has to do with the manipulation of perceptual mechanisms.

Now, apart from the aforementioned experience dedicated to the operations of camouflage by the Ghost Army during the war, it struck me that Kelly, being an outsider, had been included among the artists in the exhibition with "The Responsive Eye", which marked the critics' consecration of the Kinetic Art movement of the sixties. The work of Kelly was positioned near Op Art because of his use of geometric configurations and chromatic contrasts that pushed the theme of perceptive ambiguity to its limits. The catalogue reads: "For a period in the mid-1960s, Kelly came close to Op art in his use of geometric configurations and colour contrasts that stressed Perceptual Ambiguities."

In a certain sense, Kelly was being recognised as a leading figure and his works were received under the general category of Kinetic Art because they centred on this fact of the ambiguity of vision. Now, I thought that it might be possible to find a link, even stretching it a bit, between all these experiences: maybe in an opposite sense, in reaction or in rejection, as if the experience of deceiving the eye might have pushed him towards an almost obsessive clarity of form, in all its parts - colour, space, light ... - that led him to develop mechanisms such as fragmentation, intended to remove recognisabilty from forms and allow only their beauty to emerge: the beauty of a curve, the reflections of light on water, forgotten space under a church vault or under a bridge.
Perhaps this was the only acceptable way for him to treat the landscape in modern times, truncating any picturesque deviation or stumbling into romanticism, and thereby achieving a clairty which is limpid, measured, crystallised in its impersonality of sign.